Migrant Caravans and the Border Control Regime in Mexico

This chapter gathers two years of research on the bio- and necrology politics behind the government practices by which migrants and refugees are deported, confined, and have their human rights violated in the migration corridor that encompasses Central America, Mexico, and the United States. We characterize the attempts to govern the lives of migrants as efforts to exploit the labor of those who seek a better life on the other side of the wall, a life that can be lived and celebrated. The research combines traditional ethnographic practices, participatory action research, digital ethnography, and media analysis. We start by analyzing the migrant caravans as a specific type of migrant struggle and a defiant form of transmigration in the region between 2018 and 2022. We propose that, in 2022, people in those caravans not only restructured the migration control regime in the region and social imaginaries regarding transmigration, but also faced a counterinsurgency operation by the state and indirect private governments that manage migration. This counterinsurgency, we argue, sought to disarticulate the political implications of the “caravans,” the transmigration of thousands of people who crossed the region without using human traffickers, disobeying the frameworks of parallel legality with which migration is governed in Mexico, thus challenging the hospitality industry that national and transnational civil society organizations sustain in this migration corridor.